Purple

Issue 8: Purple

Purple is an interesting colour that symbolises royalty, nobility, luxury, power, and ambition. It is one of those colours that has a very broad spectrum from the bluest of purples to the reddest of them. Violet and maroon could never be confused as similar colours but are both shades of purple. It was not surprising that there was a myriad of shades of purples in our submissions this month from lilacs to red wines to ermine!

Our featured poet this month was a featured writer in the first volume of Sixteen Magazine. Gerry Hanberry has written a deeply affecting poem called Wounds and focuses on the purple colour of a bruise. The poem starts off with the reader believing he or she is possibly reading a love poem but very quickly has the rug pulled under as it descends into the awful experience of domestic abuse. Gerry successfully achieves this without the slightest sense of melodrama and allows the simple words fill the reader with a gasp. Read Gerry’s poem here >>

Our featured writer is Conor Montague who says in his bio that he was voted least likely to succeed by colleagues on his MA in Writing! Capital Vices intrigued from the start. It intrigued in not only its content, story and characters but also its descriptive style. Conor has an interesting way of opening paragraphs, describing clothes, objects and people. Setting the scene well each time. The colours of lilac and yellow and damp brown pop out from the text and some paragraphs read like a stanza in a poem. Read Conor’s short story here >>